According to Burson-Marsteller’s Fortune Global 100 Social Media Study, 79 percent of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune Global 500 index are using at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs.
65% are on Twitter
54% have a Facebook fan page,
50% have a YouTube channel
33% have corporate blogs
20% are using all of the above
Mashable has more specifics that show power users driving Twitter usage here. The following graphics, also from Mashable illustrate the point.
Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a story on new service, RSSFriends, which offers an RSS feed of any accounts that follow or unfollow a given account among other things. Marshall astutely points out, a service like that can be gold for online brand management.
We hear a lot a about artists and athletes getting into trouble on Twitter. Tweeting at the wrong time or tweeting things they wish they could take back seems to be the new normal. Last night in Indiana was a different story. Lady Gaga followers on Twitter learned real time from Lady Gaga herself why she seemingly inexplicably canceled a show just minutes before she was to go on stage.
Lady GaGa explained what was happening as it was happening via Twitter. In Lady Gaga’s words…
_”I’ve been crying for hours, I feel like I let my fans down 2nite. An hour before the show, I was feeling dizzy and having trouble breathing”
“Paramedics came to take care of me, and told me my heart-rate was irregular— a result of exhaustion and dehydration.”
“can’t apologize enough for how sorry I am. I could hear my fans cheering from my dressing room, I begged everyone to let me go onstage.”
“My stage has complicated mechanical elements,everyone was concerned I’d be in danger during the 2hr show, since I had passed out earlier.”
“I am so devastated. I have performed with the flu, a cold, strep throat: I would never cancel a show just based on discomfort.”
“I hope you can forgive me. I love my little monsters more than anything, you are everything to me. I will make-up the performance on Jan 26.”_
This kind of real-time and heartfelt communication directly to fans did a lot to mitigate the bad feelings of concert goers. Instead of fans left wondering what happened and feeling cheated, they hear exactly what was going on and in this case the rescheduled date. Sure, some fans will still be frustrated, but as a rule more communication is better than less and addressing frustration in the moment can do a ton to defuse a tense situation.
Dish up a few pieces of TechCrunch with all the trimmings, some Mashable potatoes with gravy, a side of ReadWriteWeb, some Inquisitr a big piece of Gigaom and of course a sixpack of Scobleizer to wash it all down.
That’s right. Hannah Montana has said so long to Twitter. She canceled her
Twitter account, which fueled speculation as to why. She attempts to clear the air with this rap.
Not sure the air is overly clear. What is more clear is Miley won’t be crossing over into R&B anytime soon. Yes, the rap was made to be fun, but the bigger question is, will other celebs take Miley’s lead and stop posting on Twitter.
The answer is no. In fact, our bet is Miley will be back very soon. She had 2 million fans following her on Twitter. During a nationwide tour that is not doing as well as her prior tour, it’s a safe bet that Miley’s label or publicity people will encourage her to get back tweeting very soon.
The Twitter visualizations used on MTV.com during the VMAs were pretty interesting. Design firm Stamen (more on their blog here) and social media monitoring company Radian6, are credited with showing VMA twitter activity around an artist or band growing and shrinking in real time according to the number tweets. The timeline remains live here.
The timeline is not overly easy to use. It tends to want to play instead of letting the user track second by second. It takes some doing, but you can see what looks to be more than 2k tweets when Kanye West takes the mic from Taylor Swift during Swift’s acceptance speech. I can see something like this being even more interesting when screen shots of what was happening at the time can be added into the timeline and associated with the tweets.
Regardless, it was a nice step toward increased TV interactivity and a complimentary, natural-feeling incorporation of social media. Leave it to MTV to do it right.
(Update)
I just heard from MTV PR. They provided some interesting stats around site traffic related to the VMA Twitter tracking…
“One day after 2.7 million unique visitors gave MTV.com its best VMA premiere day in the site’s history, **5.5 million people visited the site on Monday**, September 14, tying MTV.com’s second-place record for unique visitors, all-time. The **site saw 53.4 million page views**, marking the second-highest day overall for the site. 17.9 million video streams were watched across the site on Monday, a whopping 64% increase from the day after the “2008 MTV Video Music Awards” and the second highest stream total in MTV.com’s history.
Additionally, through the “Twitter Visualization” tool, MTV,** tracked upwards of 1.75M tweets about the show** by the end of the second airing (2:30AM EDT), and more than **2M total tweets as of midday on Monday**, September 14.
“During MTV’s VMAs, Twitter experienced three times our average volume of tweets, and twice as many as during the news surrounding Michael Jackson this past summer,” said Chloe Sladden, director of media partnerships at Twitter. “The unique level of viewer engagement MTV was able to inspire during the VMAs was impressive. We think Twitter can be the way television becomes more interactive and MTV is showing us the way.”
No doubt outrageous behavior by Kanye West on the VMAs drove interest in the content MTV was making available, but MTV’s unique social media integration was successful in drawing people from Twitter into the conversation as well drove viewership during the show and pageviews on the site after the show — to see what happened.
